Important: Shopify's help center says Stocky will no longer be available after August 31, 2026. If you currently use Stocky for purchase orders, stocktakes, supplier ordering, or Shopify POS inventory workflows, you need a replacement before that date. Source: Shopify Stocky help center.
The replacement question is not only "which app looks most like Stocky?" It is whether you want another inventory app, or whether this is the right moment to upgrade to a closed-loop procurement platform built around a living purchase order.
Stocky helped Shopify POS operators create POs and manage inventory. LineNow handles the larger buying loop: inventory recommendations, purchase orders, supplier communication, AI on supplier replies, receiving, inventory updates, and accounting handoff. If Stocky was the PO-and-inventory layer, LineNow is the system that keeps working after the PO is sent.
TL;DR
| Stocky | LineNow | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Discontinued Aug 31, 2026 | Active and growing |
| Closed-loop control (no duplicate entry between events) | No | Yes — living PO loop from order through receiving and accounting context |
| Layer 1 AI: agentic supplier-reply monitoring | No | Yes — creates structured updates for status, items, prices, ETAs, substitutions, and invoice IDs |
| Layer 2 AI: structured-data insights chatbot + saved reports | No | Yes |
| Team collaboration on supplier email threads inside the system | No | Yes |
| Statistical demand forecasting (SBA, decay-aware) | Basic suggestions | Yes — published operations-research stack |
| Recipe / BOM costing | No | Yes |
| Multi-POS (not just Shopify) | Shopify only | Shopify, Square, Toast, Faire, Clover |
| Send POs via email, WhatsApp, EDI, supplier portal | Email PDF only | Supported channels by supplier |
| QuickBooks/Xero handoff with configured account mapping | Limited | Yes |
| Embedded PO payments | No | Yes (via Stripe Connect) |
| Capital / cash-flow forecasting | No | Yes (10 months rolling) |
| Multi-vertical (retail + dropship + restaurant + manufacturer) | Retail (POS Pro) only | Retail, dropship, restaurant, and light manufacturing |
| Pricing | Bundled with POS Pro ($89/mo/loc) | $50/mo flat core plan, 90-day free trial |
Migrating from Stocky
Operators who used Stocky for inventory tracking, PO generation, and stocktake workflows can replace all of it with LineNow:
- Inventory tracking — Real-time POS sync, statistical PAR with decay handling, days-of-stock projections, automated alerts. Equivalent to or deeper than Stocky's inventory layer.
- PO generation — One-click POs from inventory recommendations, sent through supported supplier channels.
- Stocktake / counts — Receive workflow with substitution handling, full audit trail.
- Multi-location — One LineNow account, all locations, $50/month flat. No per-location pricing.
Most Stocky migrations are scoped by catalog cleanliness, supplier records, and how many historical POs the operator wants to preserve. The Shopify catalog can seed the setup; supplier records can be brought in from existing POs or QuickBooks; and the recommendation engine becomes more useful once recent POS sales are visible.
What Stocky was missing — and LineNow has
The structural gap in Stocky was that it behaved like a one-way PO generator. After Stocky emailed a PDF, the supplier's reply landed in your inbox, you read and re-typed the changes, and Stocky was unaware of any of it. For operators with more than a handful of suppliers, that left the hardest work outside the system.
LineNow is the opposite: a closed-loop control system. Once a PO leaves the system, an AI agent watches supported supplier channels — Gmail, Microsoft 365, forwarded mailboxes, WhatsApp Business, EDI, web portals — and creates reviewable order changes. Status, line items, prices, ETAs, substitutions, confirmation IDs, invoice IDs, shipping info — all parsed and structured with less re-typing.
This is the Layer 1 AI capability most analogous to Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Supplier Communications Agent: software that reads supplier communication and turns it into order state. LineNow includes that supplier-reply workflow in the $50/month subscription for teams.
On top of that clean ledger sits Layer 2 AI: a conversational chatbot that answers natural-language questions about your business, generates custom reports, and can draft a PO from a high-level prompt for your review. Stocky had nothing equivalent.
The team collaboration moat
LineNow ingests every supplier email into the system, attached to the order it concerns. The communication tab on each PO is a single chronological view of: outbound system actions, inbound supplier emails (parsed and visible), WhatsApp messages, EDI documents, and team comments. Multiple people can reply to the same supplier thread without sharing an inbox. Every reply is attributed; every system action is logged.
This is the differentiator most operators don't realize they need until they have it. Stocky never offered it.
Forecasting depth Stocky never had
Stocky's stock-suggestion logic was a sell-through-rate heuristic. LineNow uses the SBC framework to classify demand into smooth, intermittent, erratic, or lumpy, and applies the Syntetos-Boylan Approximation (Syntetos & Boylan, 2005) for non-smooth items. Decay-aware PAR for perishables. Statistical safety stock with z-scores by service level. The difference is transparent inventory-planning math tied to a supplier PO workflow.
Pricing
Stocky required Shopify POS Pro ($89/mo per location). A 4-location operator paid $356/month before the platform was discontinued.
LineNow: $50/month flat core plan, supported locations in one account, 90-day free trial.
When to migrate
Now. Stocky's deprecation date is approaching, and the longer you wait, the more compressed your migration window becomes. LineNow's 90-day free trial gives you 3 months to run in parallel before any subscription cost — long enough to retire Stocky entirely on your own timeline.
The honest call
LineNow is not the cheap-and-cheerful Stocky replacement. It is a structurally larger system than Stocky ever was: living PO control, two layers of AI, team collaboration on supplier emails, supported supplier-channel workflows, statistical replenishment with published methodology, and multi-vertical architecture. Replacing Stocky with LineNow is not just app replacement; it is a move from inventory app to closed-loop procurement.